Public Spheres, Blogospheres

As a general rule, my advice: No, you shouldn’t, not if you don’t have tenure and want it. You can’t afford it, both in terms of risks and return. It’s not a close call.

The problem with those panels and such is severe selection bias. There are some rare and unusual situations where someone does very well with blogging. They can then go around evangelizing blogging. But – THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM BLOGGING IS AN UTTER DISASTER AREN’T ON THE PANELS! Moreover, it’s socially much more acceptable to tell a “success story” rather than a “failure story”. Then the bogosphere amplifies that bias.

And the few ways blogging can help someone in general, like sucking up to the A-listers in a field, or attracting political patrons, are not easy to discuss in polite company.

You might find relevant a column I wrote:

“Great internet campaigns don’t guarantee success in politics”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/14/politics.internet

“Internet evangelism shares a marketing technique with sellers of quack medicine, in that the promoters are eager to emphasise any successes and ignore any failures. A snake-oil seller might present a testimonial from an ill person who tried a folk remedy and subsequently improved. But we won’t hear about all the people who got worse or even died no matter how much they drank the Kool-Aid. There are no double-blind tests for safety and effectiveness.”

Whoever made that poster might well love crookedtimber.com, but unfortunately it makes Eszter seem like a book and costume jewelry vendor.

These matters are much more complex than you tend to present them (and that’s all I will say about this here).

Of course, because this is the declasse blog medium where true discourse cannot occur. You have to get on a plane and discuss this at a conference with your peers to address the vast complexity of the issue.

There is no way that Socrates could have had a fruitful discourse with a bunch of random Greeks in the streets of Athens. If he were publishing in a refereed journal, then we could take him seriously. Blogging, for you, is like street talk. It is intrinsically unworthy, undignified, and unserious. A real discourse happens among credentialed scholars on hallowed ground.

Wow, there’s a near-perfect symmetry between Seth F.’s bitter anti-internet screeds and HH’s crackpot anti-academia screeds, isn’t there? (Well, except for Seth not being an utter loon.)

I was tempted to post a comment here myself, to the effect that Ezster tends to frame conversations as being specifically among academics in a way that most other CT bloggers don’t. (E.g. announcing an open faculty position here, something that is obviously of zero interest to the vast majority of us with other careers.) But after seeing how it looks in the funhouse mirror of HH, I think I won’t.

lemuel pitkin: Please – I’m fanatically PRO-internet, in the sense that I’ve put in a HUGE amount of time trying to preserve the freedom of the Net. I’ve written extensively elsewhere about the Internet. What I am is anti-huckster, anti-scammer, anti-blog-evangelist – and yes, bitterly so.

Eszter: Of course what I said is meant as a quick, comment-box, generalization. But “it depends” seems to me to connote too much 50/50, to something that’s more like 95/5 (metaphorically). It’s like “Should someone ingest large amounts of narcotics?” – there are cases where the answer is “yes” (major surgery, terminal cancer, severe injury) – but around 99% of the people who are ingesting large amounts of narcotics are probably shouldn’t be doing it, and may harm themselves in the long term even if it feels good in the short term (though that’s not absolutely certain, formally, but merely a strong possibility).

NO, IT DOES NOT: Internet evangelism

You don’t have to take my word for it either, but I don’t want to seem to be puffing myself.

No:

Internet evangelism : sellers of quack medicine :: the internet : medicine

See the difference?

Sure. But if that’s what you meant, you would have written, “internet evangelism shares a problem with pharmaceutical marketing,” or something like that. But what you in fact wrote was, “Internet evangelism shares a marketing technique with sellers of quack medicine”. I.e. it’s not just that the sales pitch is excessive, the product is inherently worthless.

And this points up the basic flaw in your writing, IMHO: you are for the interent, but against “hucksters”, “scammers”, etc. Well of course: so is everyone. But since you never offer any operational criteria to distinguish the hucksters and scammers from ordinary enthusiasts, in practice the definition just ends up being “stuff on the Internet Seth Finkelstein doesn’t like.” You kind of waver back and forth between the minimal claim that blogs, wikipedia, online fundraising, etc. aren’t as transformational as their most ardent supporters claim, and the maximal claim that they are worthless or actively harmful; like everyone who plays this kind of game, you imply the strong claim to make your stuff interestingly controversial, but when you’re challenged on it you fall back on the anodyne weak one.

Eh, I’ll do some small “puffing”, to hopefully minimize abuse – I’ve been on the Internet since the mid-_80’s_ (I went to MIT for college, so I had access there), I had one of the earliest web sites there, I’ve done years and years of electronic free speech activism, for which I’ve received honors, including a prominent award from the EFF. To call me “anti-internet” is absurd.

But I passionately – bitterly – oppose a certain type of cruel and exploitative marketing pitch, which preys upon people’s hopes and dreams, often for the profit of the manipulator.
Sometimes such opposition to deceptive arguments is tarred as anti-technology itself – “Luddite” is the typical epithet. My points are fundamentally mathematical in any case.

lemuel pitkin/15: The product being Internet evangelism, is inherently worthless, yes.

Look, you’re doing the tedious technique of taking one part of a phrase where the second word heavily modifies the first, and claiming the critique is intended for the first word standing alone. I forget the technical name for this, but it’s obviously fallacious.

No, everyone is not for the Internet – many people consider technology intrinsically anti-human. I don’t. I love science and technology. I refute your criticism “you never offer any operational criteria to distinguish the hucksters and scammers from ordinary enthusiasts,” – a HUGE operational criteria, which I pound often, is who is getting paid, and how are they making their money? I make this point over and over again, in my columns:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/25/comment.intellectualproperty

“There, “community” means audience eventually to be sold to a media conglomerate or rented out for fundraising. Instead, talk to union organisers, or lawyers who represent poor defendants, or academics who’ve studied social movements. Don’t listen to anyone who has a book to hype, a conference speaking career, or most importantly, any involvement with start-up companies trying to get bought. Because what they sell is YOU.”

What I am indeed leery of doing is loudly naming names, because I’m been through enough smears and lying thrown at me in my life, so I’ll live with that logical problem.

Tired of listening to that crank, Magneto? Let’s hear what a reputable academic has to say:

the old ways of circulating the results of scholarly research are no longer working as well for us as they should, whether because they’re too expensive, too slow, too text-based, too linear, too static, too univocal, or too proprietary. The answer, such texts often indicate, may be found in the Internet, or some subset thereof: digital network-based publishing can enable the free (or at least less expensive) distribution of more scholarly work, in a more timely fashion, to more people; it can enable scholars to write in more inventive, multi-modal forms; it can facilitate collaboration and discussion of scholarship, thereby resulting in the production of more compelling new work. All of this is, to varying extents, true, and this text like those that have gone before it will trumpet a number of the core values of Internet-based publishing, including open access, Creative Commons licensing, the gift economy, and the like.

What such arguments about the digital future of scholarly publishing often fail to account for, however, is the fundamentally conservative nature of academic institutions, and — despite the rhetoric of provocateurs like David Horowitz — the similar conservatism of the academics that comprise them. In the main, academics are resistant to change in their ways of working; it is not without reason that a senior colleague once joked to me that the motto of our institution (and, I’d argue, the academy more broadly) could easily be that often attributed to the Presbyterian church: “We have never done it that way before.”

— Kathleen Fitzpatrick

http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/planned-obsolescence-the-proposal/

The piece linked in 19 is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. It mixes obviously absurd claims for the internet (it will make government obsolete) and seemingly realistic ones (it will make it easier for writers, musiciansetc. to disseminate their work heard without corproate intermediaries). The implication is that they are equally silly but the argument is never actually made.

The main argument is that what seem to efforts to produce and disseminate free content (via blogs, wikis, social netwokring sites, etc.) are actually intended to trick people into working for free for profit-making enterprises. (Seth F.: I think you’ll agree that’s a fair summary.)

But is this claim being made about all forms of free content, or a lot of it, or only a few clear-cut scam sites? The piece doesn’t say; the entire argument is made in terms of general principles, without a single example. Seth says, “Popularity data-mining businesses are not a model for civil society,” and who could argue? But what does that mean in practice?

Literally an hour ago, I check the MySpace page of a guy I know who started a new band recently, downloaded one of his new songs and noted his first show in my calendar. (Among the Oak and Ash at Joe’s Pub Nov. 17, for anyone any alt-country fans.) Was I — or he — just unknowingly vicimized by a data miner? Seth’s peice certainly seems to imply so, but since he won’t “name names”, who knows?

Seth goes on to advise us to ” stay away from the bubble of privilege where everyone is backscratching everyone else in the service of business deals.” I agree! that certainly sounds bad! But what is in the bubble,e xactly? Is MySpace, Facebook, etc.? Is Wikipedia? (I’m guessing this one’s a yes.) Are blogs? or only some of them? How about online content for the Guardian? Upthread, Seth suggests that the operational criterion is whether you make money. But he also says that if you participate in online communities for free, you are a sucker contributing “unpaid labor”.

Seriously, I challenge anyone to read the piece Seth links in 19 and tell what, exactly, he is talking about. Like all of Seth’s pieces — and I really have read a lot of them — the structure of the argument is “Some people say the internet is wonderful. But deceiving and exploiting peoople is bad.” The natural reading is always that online communities are generally or inevitably deceptive and exploitative. But when he’s challenged, it turns out he’s just saying that bad stuff is bad. The same bait and switch, every time.

HH, Kathleen Fitzpatrick writes things in those two paragraphs that as far as I can tell are reasonably well understood by CT contributors.

Fitzpatrick proposes far-reaching changes in the nature of scholarly collaboration based on obvious exploitation of Internet capabilities. If she were to follow the logic of those changes to the consequences of radical institutional change, she would be denounced as a “crank.”

If she were to follow the logic of those changes to the consequences of radical institutional change, she would be denounced as a “crank.”

No, if she wrote what you write the way you write it, she would be a crank.

EH:These matters are much more complex than you tend to present them (and that’s all I will say about this here).

HH:Of course, because this is the declasse blog medium where true discourse cannot occur.

No, that’s not it at all HH. Your presentation is oversimplified (at best) because you are inept.

I assert that “crank” status will be readily conferred on anyone with the temerity to assert radical change in the organization of the world’s universities – irrespective of the scope and quality of supporting arguments.

Blogging is a nascent phenomenon, and it is not difficult to imagine more evolved forms of blogging that would be excellent vehicles for scholarly interaction – but how can one explore those possibilities while ignoring the implications for the organization of faculties, departments, and, yes, universities?

irrespective of the scope and quality of supporting arguments.

Here you are just wrong, and laughably so. As any proper effort to acquaint yourself with the history of these ideas would teach you. You run into trouble because the good ideas you repeat are for the most part old hat (and, contrary to your positioning of it, much of this was proposed and supported by academics). Nobody is likely to refute much of it or even likely engage with your typically superficial framing. There is no “there”, there.

On the other hand, most of your (more?) original material is nonsensical, much of it strongly held without real support or even in the face of good arguments to the contrary. You keep at it though, holding hard to your tack, heedless of the evidence around you.

So there is no need to worry, you’ve come by your “crank” status honestly by dint of hard work and impressive obtuseness, strong props to nutty ideas. It might be psychologically comfortable to cast yourself in the role of a prescient outsider, a member of an unsung group of heroes, martyred for the audacity to speak truth to the establishment. It’s rubbish though. Other can only earth the label as you have, through voluminous production of drek.

Just as a sheer matter of curiosity on this topic–not the mutual pissing contest which the comments thread seems to have turned into–what does or would Habermas have to say about the internet and his ideas of universal political discourse?

This is an honest and uninformed question, by the way, so please reply with civility. Thank you.

Epicurean Dealmaker: one of Eszter’s co-panelists has discussed this before.

I started writing a rebuttal comment, but nobody seems interested. Looks like it’ll be too long and too much effort. Nolo contendere, I guess.

I started writing a rebuttal comment, but nobody seems interested.

I’m interested!

I meant rebuttal to lemuel pitkin’s critique – I started “Please note my columns are constrained to be less than 700 words and to a general audience. There simply isn’t room to write the extremely hedged and detailed sort of elaboration you seem to require. I link and point to them since they’re reasonably high social status conveying of a concept (i.e. it’s not readily dismissible as me ranting).”. But then I realized how long the specifics would need to be.

Anyway, my point at the top of the thread was the panel mathematical skewing process, which is independent of whether my columns are trivial or profound.

>>
People are dismissing you because you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about.
<<

In a previous thread, I was told, quite bluntly, that the basic arrangements of university teaching, the collection of scholars and students in close proximity on a dedicated campus, were certain to remain unaltered for the next two centuries. I have also been informed by Watson Aname, in this thread, that all credible notions of Internet-based structural changes to university teaching have been thoroughly examined and discarded as ineffective. Thus was my ignorance exposed.

This leads me to the question of how the academic community is :

1) Eagerly and fearlessly following the path of Internet technology exploitation for the greater glory of civilization

AND

2) Stoutly denying that any material changes to the campus-based system of higher education will result from the advances in 1)

These positions would appear to be contradictory.

I have also been informed by Watson Aname, in this thread, that all credible notions of Internet-based structural changes to university teaching have been thoroughly examined and discarded as ineffective.

That’s not at all what I said; I’d appreciate that you don’t misrepresent my words. The fundamental problem here is the lack of credibility in your notions, nothing more general.

By the way, nobody to my knowledge has ever denied here that any material changes to higher education are likely due to (1). It’s just that the particular material changes you seem to think are completely certain to come about would seem to be unlikely, or if we allow for long time horizons, very speculative.

But Seth, your orioginal comment was typical of your method. You assert that “BLOGGING IS AN UTTER DISASTER” (vigorous emphasis in the original) for lots of people — not just for a few, but for so many that not including any on a panel constitutes “severe selection bias.” (ditto).

You back up this very strong assertion with a link, which one might expect to contain some evidence for the DISASTEROUSNESS of blogging, or examples of people ahrmed by it. But instead it’s just an article about how unspecified people are promoting unspecified “snake oil” about the political potential of the internet.

lemuel pitkin: Sigh, your comment (#49) encapsulates why I decided against a detailed rebuttal. Compare how you quoted:

“You assert that “BLOGGING IS AN UTTER DISASTER” (vigorous emphasis in the original) for lots of people – not just for a few, but for so many that not including any on a panel constitutes “severe selection bias.”

With what I actually wrote:

“The problem with those panels and such is severe selection bias. There are some rare and unusual situations where someone does very well with blogging. They can then go around evangelizing blogging. But – THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM BLOGGING IS AN UTTER DISASTER AREN’T ON THE PANELS! Moreover, it’s socially much more acceptable to tell a “success story” rather than a “failure story”. Then the bogosphere amplifies that bias.”

It seems to me at best, you’re read that tendentiously, and at worst, you’ve distorted my meaning to knock-down a strawman. At heart, I’m making a mathematical point – if there are big winners, there almost certainly have to be big losers, and showing one and not the other is severe skew. Like quack medicine showing the people who get better and not the people who get worse.

Frankly, this doesn’t seem like a hard point to me.

Look at how much effort I have to go through on this. Look at the exchange we had above, about accusing me of being “anti-Internet” for opposing “Internet evangelism”. Frankly, going through paragraphs and paragraphs of this in the tail of a thread seemed like it wasn’t going to be productive.

>>
The fallacy of technological determinism has led many people to make confident predictions about the future that didn’t come true.

however distant that point may be

Well, sure, if you throw that qualifier in there, then who would disagree?
<<

It isn’t “technological” determinism. I don’t see how making it steadily easier for scholars to collaborate ends up preserving their division into discrete institutional faculties. All of the arguments for fostering teamwork and collaboration within a large university apply a fortieri across universities. As soon as it becomes just as easy to work with colleagues on the other side of the world as it is to work with those on the other side of the building, the campus model fades away.

I am reasoning from first principles. If bringing scholars together is good, then any technological means that amplifies that process is desirable, and if that technology undermines the rationale for geographically chartered institutions, then that will be a byproduct of progress.

I won’t belabor the argument further. The events of the next two decades will settle the issue.

At heart, I’m making a mathematical point – if there are big winners, there almost certainly have to be big losers, and showing one and not the other is severe skew.

This is flawed reasoning – there isn’t any particular reason why big winners must imply big losers, unless academic bloggers are playing against each other in a zero sum game, which seems improbable. And the evidence doesn’t seem to support your claims. The last time I counted, a couple of years ago, I found 400 or so active academic bloggers. Most of them, as best as I could tell, had neither won very much or lost very much. They were puttering along, doing their own thing, writing for relatively small audiences of friends or colleagues. There didn’t seem to be much evidence of people’s careers being hurt by blogging – and the number of publicly known cases where it has really hurt someone can be numbered on the fingers of two hands at most. As best as I can tell – as someone who has actually kept an eye on this, blogging certainly isn’t going to win fame and fortune for most academics, but nor is it likely to result in career disaster, unless they do obviously silly things like writing long and loving descriptions of the disgusting ways in which their department heads eat soup. But nor do I think, as best as I can tell, that most academic bloggers _are_ doing it for career reasons. They’re doing it because they like to write for a different audience, whether real or imaginary. If you’ve got any evidence (or even if you can claim that you’ve looked at this closely across a large number of people), to support your suggestion that it is 95% likely to be a bad idea, Seth, I’d love to see it. Otherwise, I’ll take it as simply being your opinion, and nothing more than that. And I do think that Lemuel Pitkin is largely right – I think that you would do your case (which _is_ worth making) much better justice if you were more careful in arguing it, and drawing some more precise distinctions between the particular phenomena that you are attacking, and the broader phenomena which may or may not be related. But that’s just _my_ opinion, for what it is worth, which may not be very much (I’m likely not the audience you are trying to win over).

HH – just to let you know that Eszter has landed, and is in agreement that the WRATH OF MAGNETO SHALL BE UNLEASHED! ! !if you don’t stop making a public nuisance of yourself.

HH- I’m pretty sure that using moderation to prevent people from turning every thread towards their own tedious hobby-horse cannot properly be called “heavy-handed”.

I won’t belabor the argument further.

Let’s look at the numbers, Henry. Here is the comment count on the most recent CT threads:

28, 4, 10, 60, 20, 11, 44, 28, 19, 21

Our present chat is part of Eszter’s 60 comment thread. Are you seriously asserting that I am somehow driving away legitimate CT traffic? Is there a scrolling space shortage here? I have commented on diverse CT topics and threads, so your monomania charge is baseless. Why don’t you just say that it is personal animus that has you chasing me from one thread to another? There is a life beyond stalking, Henry. Take a deep breath and let freedom reign.

HH- I’m pretty sure that using moderation to prevent people from turning every thread towards their own tedious hobby-horse cannot properly be called “heavy-handed”.

That is just not fair. I have commented on several CT threads unrelated to the “hobby horse” of the relations of Internet technology to academia. A much smaller model of this horse, by the way, is what Eszter is happily riding at her conference. The difference is that Eszter’s narrower views of these phenomena are considered palatable, and non-threatening, and my “cranky” ideas are not.

I never imagined that a collection of scholars steeped in the spirit of intellectual freedom would be so hostile to unorthodox views. I now know better. Henry did not simply delete my posts, he substituted deliberately derisive mocking posts for them, a kind of contemptuous behavior that not even the most raffish polemical blogs condone. I hope you were properly amused.

Quack medicine again – drugs which have powerful effects also have powerful side effects. If blogging can make one’s career, it stands to reason it can also break one’s career.

I have some sympathy for this, but it’s once again an argument that you take too far. Obviously more public writing can get you in trouble if you’re writing about touchy things. If, however, you’re using your blog as another tool to help students along through their coursework for a semester, blogging seems entirely mundane unless you really are a horrible writer or an awful person or some thrillingly terrible combination of both. Not sure how rare that is.

It’s an argument for never eating bananas because of those slippery peels.

My blog helped me in get my current job. It certainly put one person who fought on my behalf in touch with me. It also helped convince a second person to support my hiring . As a social networking tool it represents much of what very little social capital I own. I do not know if it prevented me from getting other jobs earlier, but I doubt it played much of a role.

“yet Seth seems to be assuming that the conversation will tend toward evangelizing blogging … Weird.”

My point in #1 was explaining exactly that – the sampling bias, the skew, “THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM BLOGGING IS AN UTTER DISASTER AREN’T ON THE PANELS!” (sigh, as a general rule). I listed several effects on that point.

Yes, indeed, the panel had not yet taken place. But this thread was taking place now. And it’s not like those sorts of panels have never been done before in human history. After around 20 years of dealing with the Internet, there’s some patterns which are recognizable. I once started writing a satirical piece on “The Conference on The Hot New Thing”. The only difference is that there wasn’t the same type of business pushing “mailing lists” or even “web home pages”.

Ooh; I don’t think I’ve ever been described as “raffish” before; keep the compliments coming.

Seth – you say (PARTLY IN ALL CAPS! ! !)

Henry, frankly, when the above ideas are so difficult to get across, I’ve come to the conclusion NO REALISTIC CONTRARY EVIDENCE WOULD EVER BE DEEMED SUFFICIENT. There’s people who in effect get paid to construct elaborate marketing for blogging. I don’t get paid to write book-length detailed academic dissections of their hype.

The key question here is: deemed sufficient by whom??? If there are any people who get paid to evangelize for blogs on these threads, I don’t know who they are (doesn’t mean that there aren’t such people here, but they are keeping a very low profile if they are around). What there are on these threads are people who have a strong interest in these topics, including people like Eszter and myself who carry out relevant academic research. And I hope it is fair to say that we are neither blog evangelizers nor blog Cassandras. Our academic prestige etc rests on us doing good research, not on selling blogs or dissing them, and both of us have done work that could reasonably provide a basis both for praise and for criticism of blogs and similar phenomena. In other words, we’re open to being convinced and persuaded by well constructed arguments that rest on good empirical evidence. Convince us. Or, alternatively, maybe moderate the hyperbole a bit since it seems (as best as I understand what you say) to be based more on your own impressions as someone who has been involved in the Internet for a long time than on serious research, and I do think that it does some damage to your presentation of your point of view, which is in principle an interesting and a legitimate one. It is true that no-one is paying you to write book length accounts of this stuff – but if you want to persuade people on the basis of the experience that you do have, this doesn’t seem (to me at least) to be a very good way of doing it.

Seth

(1) There are surely sociological and institutional pressures within academia. The point is that as best as I can tell, the sociological and institutional pressures within the particular bits of academia that Eszter and I inhabit point in the opposite direction – that is, they tend towards a mild skepticism about the social importance of Internet-related phenomena. Eszter posted on this recently, I believe. If you have contrary evidence or arguments suggesting that we do have strong incentives to go the other way, I’d love to hear it. Because I’m not seeing it.

(2) We’re not talking in a context where blog evangelists are likely to shout you down or do things to hurt your career. We’re talking in a thread on a somewhat-well-known-but-not-hugely-important-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things blog which mostly appeals to academics in philosophy and social sciences, and non-academics who have an interest in what philosophers and social scientists have to say. People here aren’t going to retaliate against you professionally for making the anti-blog/wikipedia/whatever case, although they certainly may push you on your evidence and arguments. I can’t see how the ‘naming names problem’ that you describe even enters into it. I’m not asking you to name names of people whose work you dislike; I’m asking you to adduce evidence in support of the claims that you do like.

(3) The ‘I may stop doing it and this self-referentially proves my point’ thing is completely out of left field. I’ve made it repeatedly clear that skepticism is a quite reasonable position as far as I’m concerned (and, I imagine, as far as pretty well all the non-lunatics who are reading this thread are concerned). You’re not being asked to stop voicing criticisms. You’re not being asked to convince the people who are in principal unconvincable. You are being asked to provide some evidence in support of your claims that a reasonable person might find persuasive. People may of course disagree about what standard that implies – but within some clear limits. This is how, I think, argument usually proceeds – and you don’t seem to be arguing in this way, which (I’ll repeat) does some disservice to the case you are trying to make. To be blunt – if you stop arguing and criticizing because you’re asked to provide reasonable evidence in support of your claims about the dire consequences of blogging, Wikipedia etc, that’s your problem, not ours.

1) Oh boy oh boy oh boy. Ha ha ha. I’ll take it to email.

2) You’re wrong. Very, very wrong. End of discussion. Again, I’ll take it to email.

[Note: I’m aware that sounds crank-ish. Anyone who wants to take a cheap-shot, save it. Again, I’ll have to live with it.]

it’s a bummer that you don’t find my posts sufficiently inclusive beyond academics as my intention certainly isn’t to exclude.

Ezster – Sorry, I was being over-critical. I enjoy your posts — and the interesting discussions (like this one!) they provoke. Keep doing what you’re doing, sez me.

Seth F.-

I’m anything but a blog evangelist. I’m sympathetic to some of your arguments and convincable on the others. And for whatever it’s worth, the only people I debate in online settings are those who I respect. But you’ve got to provide some evidence to back up your views.

It just is not axiomatically true that blogging must be a disaster for some people. It’s perfectly possible that it is genuinely helpful (whether in people’s careers or other goals academics might value — like, say, reaching a broader audience). Or it may be that it has no significant effects one way or the other. Determining which is these possibilites is the case requries empirical evidence. Where is it?

I’m not going to drop this. You make these arguments all the time. I don’t want you to stop making them, but I do want you too stop making them *without evidence*. If you make strong claims in settings where people can talk back, you *will* be asked for evidence and challenged to back up what you say. That doesn’t mean people are unconvincable; it just means they have to be convinced.

The point is that – and I keep saying this, for the third time – “NO REALISTIC CONTRARY EVIDENCE WOULD EVER BE DEEMED SUFFICIENT.”

You keep saying it, but that doesn’t make it so. It is absolutely impossible to imagine that Henry and I (and lots of other folks) could be persuaded, but just haven’t been yet?

You Win. Waste Of Time. I Give Up.

No, if you stop talking to me, I lose. I really do think you have some important points to make, if you would just stop treating people who don’t (yet) agree with you as the enemy.

Otto, I think your points make good sense.

If you want to get tenure you must avoid angering anybody who could and would deny it to you when you disagree with them or anger them. Your professional work might anger them too, and they’re *supposed* to pay attention to it.

Blogging gets you immediate feedback (assuming you’re moderately successful at blogging, almost humiliating if you put your ideas out on a blog and still get no responses). It also makes it easier for your ideas, informally presented and thus maybe even more insulting, to get to those who’d be most insulted. And currently it gives no particular academic status.

So when you publish, you get academic rewards and you take risks. When you blog you get no academic rewards and you take different risks.

Say you lose your tenure bid. Then having a successful blog might make you more marketable when you look elsewhere. People may have heard of you who wouldn’t otherwise. They can look at some of your skills in an informal setting.

It might be safer to blog under a pseudonym. Then you get the personal feedback you want, without the academic risks. But you don’t get professional recognition if it works.

When Dan Drezner lost his tenure bid, there was a natural suspicion that he just wasn’t very good. But there was also a fair chance that his blogging hurt him and he’d have gotten it except for that. So if you believe that blogging won’t hurt your career, and then you get a loss anyway, at that point it can help. Your blog friends might help you get a new chance, your lucid blog explanations showcase your abilities, and you have a ready-made excuse for losing the first try.

Palmists are of course in no doubt as to who was right.

You wish to depict me as irrational, but I have nowhere insisted that my expectations of the future of the university are infallible or irrefutable. I have not censored anyone, Henry, nor have I heaped derision on anyone here. I have abandoned posting on your threads because you have singled me out for censorship.

I was attracted to CT because it was one of the few discussion communities with scholarly people interested in technology. It actually entered my head that some of these people would wish to engage in broad discussions of the future evolution of society, including the impact of the Internet on educational institutions.

Now, I try to post on a subject directly relevant to this thread: blogging in the University, and you come after me with your little hatchet. You have tried to shout me down, and now are threatening to replace my posts with juvenile mockery. Just who is behaving badly here?

Who on CT has established, as a matter of doctrinal purity, that technology-driven structural change in the university can only arrive in tiny increments and can never alter the fundamental character of campus education? Was it you, Henry? Was it Eszter? How and when did this become an unshakeable truth shared by this community?

Not the ridiculed pioneer, that’s for sure.

Are you trying to win some prize for consistent display of animosity, Bubba? Or is your mission to follow Henry around and periodically shout “What he said!” Why don’t you try to engage the thread topic – or are you waiting for the conference proceedings to be published first?

Here is the report of Eszter’s contribution from the referenced “write-up:”

Hargittai, who received a Ph.D. from Princeton University, is a veteran blogger who created her first Internet Web log in 2002, named Eszter’s Blog. Although she typically blogs about her research as a fellow at Harvard University, she has received praise for blogging about personal hobbies. Still, the anonymous nature of the Internet breeds more criticism than an intimate, interpersonal forum.

“I find it cowardly when people attack you and don’t use their name,” Hargittai said. “Blogging is emotionally draining; it takes energy.”

Hargittai found an interesting correlation between female bloggers and anonymity – namely, that female bloggers were less likely to use their real names, relying on anonymity to prevent vicious gender criticism undermining her Internet opinions.

“A big part of [the anonymity] is probably these big attacks [by other bloggers],” Hargittai said.

“I find it cowardly when people attack you and don’t use their name,” Hargittai said. “Blogging is emotionally draining; it takes energy.”

I understand where you’re coming from. but look: you’re an academic: even untenured, you’ve got a level of job security most of us can only dream of.

Many people — including little old government-employed me — simply could not participate in the blog world under our real names without a real risk of losing our jobs. I actually know this first-hand, from some nasty fallout I experienced when I used to take part in online discussions (it was mailing lists then) non-pseudonymously.

(also note: pseudonymous is not the same as anonymous.)

it’s not fun to be attacked in vicious ways no matter in what situation, but when someone does so anonymously (or even under a pseudonym where I don’t know who the person is), it’s unbelievably cowardly.

Ezster,

In an ideal world, I agree. But do you not see that for many people participating in online debates under our real names just is not an option? Should we be excluded from forums like CT? Or is dealing with pseudonymous interlocutors just a price we all have to pay for living in a world where most people don’t enjoy the job security that you do?

(Of cours personal attacks are bad — whether they’re made under real names or otherwise. I strive to avoid them but if you think I cross the line please let me know and I’ll desist.)

lemuel pitkin: I know about Drezner. I could have given him. I also know how it goes:

Evangelist: Produce evidence!
Me: Case X.
Evangelist: No good! He’s doesn’t count, because, etc.
Me: Case Y.
Evangelist: Not acceptable! She isn’t a counter-example because, etc.
Me: Case Z.
Evangelist: I won’t be convinced! Because, etc.
Me: I give up. You win. Waste of time.
Evangelist: WHERE’S YOUR EVIDENCE? I want evidence! I’ve been asking, and asking, and asking, and you CAN’T DO IT! Hey, maybe you think you can get away with this when you pontificate in that elitist old-media way, but with blogs, with comments I PROVE YOU WRONG!!!
[sigh, yes, there is a certain amount of exaggeration for effect here, I know]

I don’t “regard the fact that [you’re] asking as a personal attack”, I said what when X is given as a blog-evangelism counter-example, the simple defensiveness algorithm is to personally attack X (meaning, X is unworthy rather than blog-evangelism is wrong).

I do regard the number of times you have twisted what I’ve said into a straw-man or a very absurd statement as an indication that the risk/reward ratio of this thread is unfavorable.

Straw-man Evidence:

#7 – “anti-internet screeds”

#51 – distorted quoting

#96 – “you regard the fact that I’m asking as a personal attack”, vs my point about evangelism unfalsifiability.

Three pieces of evidence.

Henry: “It ain’t Lemuel who is busy constructing straw men here”

I rest my case that reasonable evidence will not be accepted.

[Disclaimer: Logical problems of philosophy are known. Throwing it back at me is not clever, just tedious.]
[Disclaimer2: I know I have a weakness for replying when I shouldn’t]

Seth – the point is that you’re _not providing reasonable evidence._ You are making grandiose claims – in this particular thread, the claim that in most or nearly all cases academic blogging is actively harmful to the academic’s career. When you’re pushed for evidence, you either say that you’ve no reason to gather the evidence (fair enough – but don’t make the very general claim in the first place then), or that you will likely suffer consequences if you name names of ridiculous Internet evangelists (but this isn’t, except insofar as you have repeatedly tried to make it one), an argument _about_ Internet evangelists, and ever-so-sad claims that if you _had_ the goods, no-one would want to listen to you anyway. And you are trying to suggest that Lemuel – who genuinely seems to _want to know_ what is happening here, is an Internet evangelist. Finally, for what it’s worth, you _do_ engage in screeds pretty frequently, if one defines screeds as being over-the-top execrations of things and people you don’t like that aren’t supported by clear explicit evidence.

This isn’t – to put it mildly – a very good way of putting your case forward, convincing the unconvinced etc. I’ve learned an awful lot from this very extended conversation over the last couple of years about the perceived personal grievances of Seth Finkelstein, but relatively little about the substantive issues at hand. That isn’t a ratio that helps either you or me.

“See, Seth, it’s not so hard”

Actually, it is, note the part “When Dan Drezner lost his tenure bid, there was a natural suspicion that he just wasn’t very good.”

The trivialize/dismiss algorithm is very simple here. When example X is given, personally attack X.

I didn’t intend to attack Drezner. I intended to condense the following exchange. When somebody loses a tenure bid isn’t the first hypothesis always that they weren’t what the people wanted who could give them tenure? And yet it could easily have been the blogging.

We don’t have controlled experiments because we never have two academics seeking tenure who’re matched for everything important except blogging. And we don’t have a large number of bloggers (and non-blogger control group) to compare tenure rates.

It’s all anecdotal evidence, and we can’t prove it either way by naming names.

If you had specific evidence, you could report that as highly-relevant anecdotes. If somebody who’d know told you not to blog because it would lose tenure. If somebody who’d know said the reason somebody lost their tenure bid because of their blogging. I’d pay attention to evidence like that though I’d want to be careful of the Friend Of A Friend effect. (FOAF)

I tend to agree with your argument from first principles. If somebody is inclined to deny you tenure because they dislike what you say, blogging will give them more opportunity to notice what you say and dislike it. Seems reasonable to me. It also gives you extra chances to impress people who might otherwise deny you tenure, but this will probably not matter as much. One guy on the tenure committee who’s fervently for you won’t matter as much as one who’s emphatically against.

But I don’t see any way to prove it. We could be wrong.

Seth – as was pretty clear from the comment, the ‘reasonable evidence’ point concerned the factual claim that you have been making in this thread. And again – you haven’t produced any. The closest thing was your early ‘mathematical’ argument that “if there are big winners, there almost certainly have to be big losers” which is not so much mathematical as really sloppy logic (there is no _ex ante_ reason why big winners mean big losers – to make this claim stick you would have to provide some evidence concerning the underlying causal relations through which big wins for some produce big losses for others etc – and you haven’t done this). I am still at a complete loss to understand what the underlying causal argument is – _what_ is the harm that is being done to the vast majority of academic bloggers? This would seem to be a rather crucial part of any argument that blogging hurts academics – but it is completely absent.

And since then, your argument in this thread has gone through a revolving cycle of (1) I can’t criticize the Internet evangelists or they would retaliate against me [which is irrelevant] (2) I don’t have the incentive to find evidence that would support my claims [why bother arguing if you don’t have this evidence] (3) even if I did, nobody would believe me [again – why bother]. Rinse. And repeat.

And as for the ‘I am not suggesting that Lemuel is an Internet evangelist’ bit – I’ll just repeat your precise formulation

Well, one could reasonably draw that implication, but I’ve carefully not said it about him, confining my points to certain patterns of argument.

and point out that intimating (which you certainly are doing – be honest here) that people who push you for real, actual evidence are Internet evangelists is both a pretty trite evasion tactic, and a piss-poor substitute for real evidence and arguments.

Again – I’m hearing an awful lot about internet evangelists. I’m hearing a lot about how you really, really love the internets and all its goodness. I’m hearing nothing in the way of actual arguments or evidence. I don’t _care_ whether you are the great Internet-hating Satan on the one hand, or Jon Postel’s secret avatar on the other. All I want to see are _good arguments_ and _good evidence_ that advance debate. Instead, we’re getting a self-defensive and self-referential shtick, that is getting very, very old.

Minor squabbling and ruffled feathers have filled the thread. Meanwhile, the substantive issues of how academic blogging can better serve society are neglected. Here is what a more ambitious thread could engage:

1. Can blogs be adapted to collaborative research?
2. Can blogs incorporate scholarly apparatus for validated references?
3. Can blog content be digested, abstracted, and stored is a fashion useful to scholars?
4. Should blog posts be citable by scholars?
5. If authors blog, should their blogs be preserved and critically appraised?
6. How can blogs be better integrated with more structured online knowledge resources?
7. Can the blogosphere be made more navigable through topical or content indexing and categorization?
8. Can blog threads be manipulated graphically for easier access?
9. Can methods be developed for preserving anonymity while preventing sock-puppetry and impersonation.
10. When will a novel be written as a blog?

Sigh … OK … once around …

My view of blogging is it’s a “return” curve akin to casino gambling or day-trading or horse race betting, etc. There’s big winners, big losers, lots people who just get burned a little etc. (and some say they’re doing it just as entertainment, which is a different issue).

If you look at my comment way back at #1:

“The problem with those panels and such is severe selection bias. There are some rare and unusual situations where someone does very well with blogging. They then go around evangelizing blogging. But – THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM BLOGGING IS AN UTTER DISASTER AREN’T ON THE PANELS! Moreover, it’s socially much more acceptable to tell a “success story” rather than a “failure story”. And the bogosphere amplifies that bias.”

That is a mathematical argument about skewing what one hears. Yes, per Henry #107, I assume there’s negative effects. This is what I mean by being pedantic, it’s a short comment, give me a break, per #58. I assume some basic familiarity with the whole background of advocacy of blogging, about what wonderful positive effects it can have.

Snipping out five words from that paragraph, and rephrasing it as a categorical instead of a dependent clause – “You assert that “BLOGGING IS AN UTTER DISASTER” – makes it sound like the grandiose claim that every person who blogs loses big.
Which is amplified by “lots of people – not just for a few, but for so many that not including any on a panel constitutes “severe selection bias”

That’s not an accurate characterization of my views. The point is that there’s a process where positives are publicized but not the negatives. Yes, I do assume there are negatives – but again, the phrasing pushes it to a strawman. If one out of a million wins big, and one out of a million loses big, showing just the one big winner alone would be a disservice even though there’s only one big loser.

Note I’m being very careful not to make claims of exact proportions of win big vs lose big, except for what I think are very reasonable assumptions that big winners are rare and big losers exist.

[See how long this is to, outline it all?]

Seth – a long comment of yours seems to have been lost from the moderation queue – I may have pressed the wrong key

OK – I was wrong – I see that the comment posted above my previous one, so it is there. Will respond tomorrow or later tonight.

Note I’m being very careful not to make claims of exact proportions of win big vs lose big, except for what I think are very reasonable assumptions that big winners are rare and big losers exist.

Why must big losers exist? There are plenty of cases where a few can profit mightily and everyone else suffers a small loss. There are plenty of other cases where those who participate profit at the expense of those who do not. There’s no reason to think that academic blogging doesn’t exhibit both attributes.

We can further argue whether cases of “I got denied tenure because my blog revealed me to be small-minded/petty/a huge asshole” should be considered a potential downside of blogging, especially when the blogger doesn’t realize that’s what’s going on.

Repeat: “drugs which have powerful effects also have powerful side effects. If blogging can make one’s career, it stands to reason it can also break one’s career.”

Repeating an assertion doesn’t make it into an argument. The bit about drugs is clearly untrue, although there is a bit of a causal relationship in the opposite direction (nasty negative effects with minimal positive effects gives you a poison, not a drug). The “if X can make one’s career, it stands to reason it can also break one’s career” is also clearly untrue, as a moderate effort to come up with values for X will show.